​Intimacy is a curious thing. We yearn for it, often when we get it we push it away only to yearn for it again. Other times we get it and it slips away from us leaving us alone and feeling abandoned. In Close-Up toothpaste commercials of the 80’s lovers run into each other’s arms kissing passionately, fall into the ocean, bodies pressed together with theme music. A Chantal Ackerman film shows lovers in the night run out of the darkness into each other’s arms with a ferocious desire and then break apart and run away from each other back into the darkness with a equal intensity. The sound track contains only the sound of their movements, feet over grass, brushing past bushes, bodies colliding. The rhythmic motion of towards and away can lead to climax, frustration and annihilation or all three.

Intimacy is often a desired place to reach, a feeling to cultivate or avoid. It suggests closeness and a knowing. The closeness could be physical or it might be close as in similar. The sharing of a particular point of view or feeling for something can often generate closeness, an intimacy of likeness; sport fans come to mind or Phish fans. One can become intimate with a landscape; there is a knowing that happens overtime as you spend time with something, learning its range of climates, topography and tools to cope with it. And the wilderness, like relationships, is never quite the experience we thought it would be.

There is immediate intimacy, attraction that feels like a magnet when eyes lock across a crowded room, love at first sight. There is a kind of intimacy that slowly develops overtime, like the movies where the protagonists start off hating each (hate is a form of intimacy) and because of circumstances in which they must join together to survive end up falling in love. Yet is love always intimate? Sometimes we love the idea we have of someone more than we know the person we have projected those ideals onto.

In a dance performance one dancer speaks to another as if they were lovers. As one speaks the other moves sometimes appearing to pay attention other times distracted by their own movements. The theme of connection and disconnection feels choppy, misaligned and grows more separate over time. It has none of the slow-mo sensation of Close-Up toothpaste commercials. There is no theme music only the interior dialogue of one partner and then the next switching roles between the speaker and the dancer. Yet they stay together, playing their parts till the disconnection becomes what holds them together, a pattern between two that contains a relationship. Bad breath may be tolerated here.